What Is Neil Young Trying To Say In His Surreal 4th Of July Anthem?

Neil Young has dropped a new track to commemorate the 4th of July, and it's as confounding as it is catchy. Marching drum beats, swelling refrains, a melody so epic and simple you'll be humming it in your head after one listen, whether you want to or not. Featuring a 56-piece orchestra and backed up by the band Promise of the Real, which includes Willie Nelson's sons Lukas and Michah, "Children of Destiny" was announced Friday by Young and Michah Nelson via Facebook Live.

Stand up for what you believe/Resist the powers that be/Preserve the land and save the sea/For the children of destiny, chants Young between verses that convey an incoherent message that feels, by turns, patriotic and defiant. Sort of.

The video is no less confusing. It's a barrage of jingoism and protest, a political statement devoid of any actual statement, aside from a vague theme of "America rocks."

Images of fighter jets and American flags, many in the hands of children at 4th of July celebrations, are interspersed with aerial shots of the Women's March in Washington, D.C., tanks rolling through presumably foreign lands, and nature footage of America's mountains and rivers. Oh, and the Kremlin, and marches in other countries, and satellite images of planet Earth. The lyrics, meanwhile, are at once triumphant and trite, as well as lazy: The people feel the pain/They feel the pain/They walk the streets/While the bombs fall in the rain/The children hide/Somewhere inside/While the bombs fall in the rain.

Apparently it's tough to find a word to rhyme with "rain."

Both the video and the song can be interpreted to support any number of political positions. On the one hand, Young implies that goodness is under siege by evil, but stops short of identifying which side of the political divide he's on. While he's clearly concerned about the environment, it's not clear whether he thinks that Trump and his administration are the good guys or the bad guys.

Consider the second chorus: Resist the powers that be/Preserve the ways of democracy/So the children can be free/The children of destiny.

Those against Trump will read this to mean that Trump is the power to resist, and that democracy is now under threat. Trumpists, meanwhile, will see the media as the power to resist, and democracy as something we lost under the "socialist Obama regime" and which Trump is fighting to restore -- that is, to "make America great again."

On top of all this, the America depicted in "Children of Destiny" harkens back to a 1980s political ad: small towns, parades, amber fields of grain and a lot of pretty, blond children. There is one black woman in the beginning of the video, marching behind a group of white people, and later a 3-second shot of a black family having a 4th of July picnic, their table adorned with American flags. There's also a little Asian girl at the end. Otherwise, the America being called to action here is mostly as white as vanilla ice cream. It's not hard to imagine the far right feeling as inspired by this video as the left, if not more so.

This ambiguity isn't helped by Neil Young's own confounding political history. A Canadian by birth, Young became an icon of the American anti-war movement of the 1960s and early '70s, performing with Crosby, Stills & Nash, but then he supported Ronald Reagan's campaign against welfare in the early 1980s. Then, in 1985, he went to bat for Middle America with the benefit concert Farm Aid. In the wake of 9/11, he released the song "Let's Roll," which heroicized the passengers on United Flight 93 who died in their attempt to thwart a terrorist hijacking, becoming part of the reactionary fervor against the Middle East that helped lead the country into war in 2003. In 2006, he lamented the interminable state of combat against an elusive, ideological enemy on the album Living With War, and sang that George W. Bush should be impeached.

Young has said before that his songs are often a reaction to the immediate political climate and tone. He wrote "Ohio" shortly after four Kent State students were killed by police during a campus protest, in 1970. He wrote "Let's Roll" right after 9/11. And he wrote "Children of Destiny" during Trump's first 100 days, give or take.

In this sense, Young's latest song and its video are a perfect reflection of the times: at once muddled and emphatic, where the catchy tune and driving beat become blank screens for whatever politics you want to project onto them. You may find yourself humming along in agreement, but what, exactly, are you agreeing with?